Page:Leo Tolstoy - Father Sergius and Other Stories and Plays - ed. Charles Theodore Hagberg Wright (1911).djvu/32

 26 selves after its victims had served their sentences and justice had ceased to meddle.

Tolstoy also gave the "corpse" a letter to Davýdov, who obtained for him some small post at the Law Courts, where he served till his death, no one but his benefactors and his own family knowing who he was. Some time after his death Davýdov told me this about him.

Part of the attraction of the story for Tolstoy lay in the fact that the intervention of the law did no good to any one, but only harm to all concerned; for it was part and parcel of Tolstoy's non-resistant theory that Law Courts and the Administration of Justice are purely noxious.

The Man who was dead has already been staged at the Artistic Theatre in Moscow, and it is to be hoped that we shall see it in London; but the last of Tolstoy's plays, The Light that shines in Darkness, was left unfinished, and is hardly likely to be produced, unless by the Stage Society or some similar organization. In Russia it is prohibited on account of its allusions to the refusal of military service.

Yet it is in some ways the most interesting of Tolstoy's posthumous works. It is obviously not strictly autobiographical, for Tolstoy was not assassinated, as the hero of the piece is, nor was his daughter engaged to be married to a young